The Winter of My Discontent

I think I'm officially in a full-blown existential crisis this winter. It had to happen sometime, I suppose.

I'm wondering just who I am now, at this point in my life, other than a mother, a widow, an employee?

Now that my children are old enough to not need me to care for their physical needs incessantly, I am not sure of my identity and what I want to become now. In my early 20s, it was all about wanting to get married, and then getting married, and then it was about being married, and then about thinking about having children, and then having a child, and then, whammo, mother and nurse and doctor and protector and pregnant and widowed/pregnant and then grief-stricken then thinking about getting remarried and then realizing that’s not the route I need to put my energy in right now but then wondering, what’s my next step? Who am I when I am not a parent? My children define me as one role, but that is just one part of me. I don’t having a living husband to define me as a wife, I don’t have a partner in the classic sense who defines me as his counterpart. I am just.. me. And who is that? Am I an activist, a writer, a home-builder, a creator, a friend, a yoga practitioner, a church goer, an environmentalist, all those things but not one thing defines me fully externally. And as good as it is to define me internally, it is also somewhat lonesome to not be defining myself with someone else. What is my next endeavor?